On starting Townhall Builder: Clash for Elixir, you’re presented with a friendly (if somewhat mischievous) dragon that ensures that your lovely dwarven miners can extract all the gems and gold you (or he) needs.
Clicking the bottom of the screen will provide you with dwarves that will go sprinting into the mineshaft, increasing your gold per second.
After you get a bit tired of clicking the summon dwarf button 500 times in a row, as per your first mission, more missions will appear instructing you about research. Yes, as in all idle games, there are ways to get money that don’t involve endlessly clicking. Certainly saves on your fingers, though.
As you continue to recruit (or build? It’s not entirely clear) dwarves, your money per second grows, allowing you to spend your money on research so you can spend more money on… more research and gold gathering. The why isn’t important of course, it’s the thrill of getting higher numbers.
The joy of Townhall Builder: Clash for Elixir is the cute ascetic and the anomalous dragons. It’s not particularly explained why you have dragons to show you what to do, but you can recruit custom dragons from a convenient dragon pit, as well as get periodic small amounts of gold randomly dropped from additional passing dragons.
Townhall Builder: Clash for Elixir is obviously an idler, and any good idler keeps you coming back to claim more and more money, so as to be able to keep playing it and achieve a better high score. In many other games of this genre, there are often reasons to continue coming back after the first twenty minutes of playing – sometimes it’s additional rewards for consecutive playtime, other times it’s some sort of consistent bonus or reset system that allows to “prestige” and go back to the very beginning, but with a much more massive bonus.
Townhall Builder: Clash for Elixir doesn’t seem to have any of that. There’s nothing to keep you coming back and nothing to keep you racing towards the top. This makes the game feel somewhat hollow and almost incomplete; why isn’t there something to get me reliably hooked?
There’s plenty of opportunities to spend real world money on additional gems to get higher bonuses, but very little reason to continue playing the game.
That said, the ascetic and manner the gameplay is introduced to the player is adorable and enjoyable. It is satisfying to summon dwarves to mine at your pleasure, as it is enjoyable to watch the money tick up and it be carted away from a convenient little train, off to tally the money no one knows where.
Despite this lack of replayability or drive to come back, Townhall Builder: Clash for Elixir manages to be cute and quirky, while still having most of the hallmarks of the idler genre.
It may not keep you coming back and resetting, but it will keep you amused and get that fleeting satisfaction of upwards ticking numbers; at least for a little while.
